What is social work?

Social work in the UK originated in nineteenth-century philanthropic and state responses to the increasingly visible social problems associated with working-class poverty in the context of accelerated industrialization and urbanization. These responses took a number of different forms. From the 1870s, in a precursor to casework, the Charity Organization Society (COS) worked with individual families to support them to help themselves out of poverty. A different kind of philanthropic activity, exemplified by the Settlement Movement, which began at around the same time, emphasized the potential of social action and a collective response to social problems that foreshadowed a community work approach within social work. Finally, the administration of the Poor Law by local government involved the assessment of individuals and families in terms of their eligibility for state support and the management of institutions such as the workhouse which catered for destitute people.

Professional social work in the twentieth century developed out of these antecedents in tandem with the evolution of the British welfare state in the period following the Second World War when social workers became state employees, mainly employed by local authorities. However, social workers also continued to work in the voluntary (third) sector, which has in recent times once again come to play a more significant role in delivering social work services, as has the private, for-profit sector. Social workers today are routinely found in a variety of voluntary, charitable and community organizations, and also in private residential care homes for the elderly and commercial fostering and adoption agencies. The great majority are, however, still state employees, employed primarily by local authorities and healthcare trusts.

While social work has always been concerned with meeting the needs of individuals and families, it has always also had a controlling function. The work of the COS was concerned with differentiating the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ poor, in order to ensure that support was only provided to the ‘deserving’, and in this way was involved in disciplining the ‘undeserving’. Contemporary social workers may have to control or police parents in order to ensure the well-being of children, or restrict the freedom of people with serious mental illness in order to protect them or other people. In exercising these dual roles of care and control, social workers have to balance the needs and interests of different individuals in relation to one another in ways that require careful professional judgement and draw on a range of disciplines and theoretical perspectives.

Social workers work with many different groups – children and young people, older adults, physically disabled people, people with learning disabilities, mentally ill people, refugees and asylum seekers – and also with a wide range of different kinds of problems – abuse and neglect, poor parenting, alcohol and other substance misuse, mental illness and disabilities of various kinds. The kinds of circumstances that require social worker involvement and the interventions that they make depend on a whole range of factors, including:

• what is identified as a social problem (for example, when does the unhappiness of an individual child become a public ‘problem’ of child neglect, requiring intervention by social workers?)
• how the social problem is understood (for example, is it seen as a problem arising from an individual or from a social deficit?)
• what other forms of informal social support are available (for example, social care services for frail elderly people will be less necessary in cultures where multigeneration households are the norm, older people are respected and women’s role is primarily domestic)
• what other kinds of formal state or voluntary-organization services are provided and how they are funded. These services may complement social work intervention or reduce the need for it (such as services offering parenting support, or support for those affected by domestic violence, or providing respite care for disabled family members to help their carers).

The way in which social workers intervene depends both on the model of change that is dominant within the profession at a particular historical time, and on the broader political and policy climate within which social work is practised. Payne (1996) identified three alternative orientations to social work practice: (i) individual–reformist, in which social work forms part of welfare services and is concerned with meeting need and improving services; (ii) reflexive–therapeutic, in which social work tries to promote individual psychological growth, self-development and self-realization; and (iii) socialist–collective, in which the focus is on empowering oppressed peoples and challenging structural inequalities. British understandings and practice have mostly allied themselves with individual–reformist and reflexive–therapeutic perspectives, although these three perspectives are not necessarily incompatible (Lymbery 2005).

Changes in the economic situation and in prevailing ideologies and political agendas have led to changes in ideas about the roles social workers should perform and the tasks they should undertake, and what kinds of knowledge social workers require, and how this should be applied to practice. The emphasis on individual casework that focused on need, which characterized social work from the 1950s to the 1980s, has given way to a concern with risk management, which has seen local authority social workers, particularly in adult social care, increasingly concerned with care management and brokering services for clients, rather than directly delivering services themselves.

There have also been important changes in how the recipients of social work interventions are conceptualized. The families and individuals whom social workers engaged with were once seen as relatively passive clients who were expected to defer to social workers. Service users nowadays are seen as consumers who should be given choices about the services they receive and whose views should be fully taken into account. Clearly, there are limits to this, engendered by both resource constraints and social work’s ‘control’ role – for example, where child protection or serious mental illness are concerned.

Placing these changes in social workers’ roles and in their relationships with service users in the broader context of the developments in social policy over the same period helps to explain why the changes occurred, and offers social workers the intellectual tools to question and challenge current policy and practice, when these appear to conflict with the profession’s ethical commitment to social justice.

What is social policy?

‘Social policy’ refers broadly to those government policies designed to address a range of human needs, such as housing, education, subsistence and health. Which needs and problems are the responsibility of the state and how best to address them are questions that have been, and continue to be, the subject of intense political debate. Furthermore, the boundaries of what constitutes ‘social policy’ are hard to define. Many different aspects of social organization affect well-being and needs – for example, measures to reduce crime or address problems such as obesity, domestic violence or relationship breakdown. Policies on income redistribution through direct and indirect taxation – the rates of income tax which individuals should pay, and the level of VAT (Value-added Tax) and the range of goods and services on which it should be levied are also important in determining the number of people living in poverty, for example. Should they be regarded as economic or social policies?

Wilson et al. (2011: 41) argue it is imperative for social workers to be aware of how social policies impact upon their work, the organizational contexts in which they are placed and their relationship to other professions. Social workers need to be able to evaluate both the potential impact of social policies on practice and the evidence put forward to support particular policies and then decide how to respond. For example, changes in policy relating to child protection practice and social work education from the 1980s onwards have been strongly influenced by highly publicized cases of children dying at the hands of their parents or carers. These cases have often resulted in crude, dichotomized media representations, followed by public inquiries which have scapegoated social workers. The public sentiment that such cases evoke, whether inadvertently or deliberately generated, has led to policies that are based on a small number of atypical tragic cases (sometimes just one), rather than an informed evaluation of standard and/or more successful practice. Child deaths have been repeatedly linked to the same kind of problems, such as insufficient communication between different professionals and organizations, which suggests that changing social policy or practice responses to this have not been successful (and perhaps could never be wholly successful in eliminating all risk).

Since the 1990s there has been a strong policy emphasis on performance measurement, leading to the introduction of standardized procedures and rigid timescales, using information systems as a way of introducing greater control and accountability of services. Standardization in this way was also intended to be a way of ensuring greater equity of service across different geographical areas. These measures have contributed to social workers sometimes taking dangerous short cuts – for example, by conducting superficial assessments that are heavily dependent on evaluation by other professionals, in order to conform to policies and regulations (Broadhurst et al. 2010b).

Front-line practitioners may also respond to social policies in ways that aim to thwart policy goals. However, such subversion can sometimes, paradoxically, have the opposite effect. The extent to which social workers are able to resist centrally prescribed policies has, however, been constrained by the imposition of these new managerial practices adapted from business models, and an associated audit culture. Nevertheless, neither the need nor the opportunity to exercise individual discretion can ever be totally eliminated. Social workers therefore need to understand that social policies have both intended and unintended consequences, may be ambiguous and are often filtered through many different organizational layers, each with different interpretations of and responses to the same policy.

There have been suggestions from some authors since the 1980s that social workers do not need to study wider social theory and social policy, discrediting these as biased ‘idealistic left-wing dogma’ (Brewer and Lait 1980; Lavalette 2014). The commentators responsible for such claims often present social work as a purely practical profession. At the same time, they stress the need for high entry requirements and resilient practitioners, implicitly acknowledging that social workers operate in complex, dynamic and high-risk situations which require multidisciplinary knowledge, competent inter-agency working and excellent communication and analytical skills. These confused statements present contradictions which perhaps can only be understood and dealt with by having a broader understanding of social policy.

The structure and logic of the book

This book aims to provide social workers and social work students with the knowledge and skills to be able to understand social policy critically, as well as how it shapes the form and direction of social work. It adopts a critical, analytical approach, exploring different political and philosophical positions and ways of viewing important concepts, such as equality and social justice, to give students and practitioners some options about what they take from this book and how they might use this knowledge to inform their practice. Although the individual chapters can be read and understood on their own, each chapter also builds on the preceding chapters. The questions for discussion at the end of each chapter can be used by individual students to reflect on and consolidate what they have learnt, or utilized by seminar leaders or lecturers to structure small or large group discussion. Students can also be directed to the additional reading material listed or invited to link the questions to specific case studies to enhance the discussion further.

Chapter 1 locates social work in its wider historical context. It looks at the socio-political conditions which shaped the beginnings of the state’s involvement in welfare provision in the UK and traces how professional social work developed in tandem with the expansion of the welfare state from the 1950s to the 1970s. It examines the consequences for the welfare state and for social work of the changes brought about by Thatcherism, New Labour’s Third Way and the 2010–15 Coalition government.

Chapter 2 focuses on the different political and philosophical perspectives, or welfare ideologies, that shaped ideas about the welfare state, such as Marxism, conservatism and neoliberalism. Longstanding cultural and ideological differences have resulted in different ways of organizing welfare states across the industrialized and post-industrialized world, dividing them into distinctive kinds of welfare regimes. These produce rather different outcomes – for example, in terms of socio-economic disparities, gender equality and wider population health and well-being. Different welfare regimes have different conceptions of citizens’ entitlements, and of the role that social work and other associated social professions can play in helping people to reach their potential. Comparisons with welfare regimes in other countries offer a useful perspective on the organization of social welfare and social work in the UK. These comparisons therefore not only illuminate the current situation in the UK but show the potential for positive change, how that might be achieved and structured, and its potential effects.

Chapter 3 addresses how particular issues come to be identified as social problems and illustrates how different understandings of social problems and their causes lead to different ideas about the appropriate solutions. Social change may result in the disappearance of a social problem – for example, ‘illegitimate children’ – or the appearance of new problems, such as the care of an ageing population. Other problems, such as child abuse, have become much more broadly defined; others may disappear and then re-emerge, but be represented differently each time – for example, the ‘deviant’ potential of young working-class men. The chapter shows how what might be taken to be an objective social problem may actually not be one, while other issues may remain unrecognized as social problems. Although a number of perspectives on social problems are described and explored, social constructionism is presented as offering the most helpful approach to understanding social problems.

Chapter 4 examines a number of concepts central to social work, such as citizenship, rights, equality, diversity and social justice, and traces the links between them as well as disputes surrounding their meaning and appropriate deployment. It evaluates how these concepts are used by social workers in the context of anti-discriminatory or anti-oppressive practice, using case examples to illustrate the knowledge and skills required to work effectively with difficult and highly sensitive social work situations.

Chapter 5 focuses on the changing institutional location of social work and the systems in place to manage it, within and across organizations. It examines the impact of the marketization of many services and the implications of this for inter-agency partnership and inter-professional working, which have become important policy priorities. The effects of current service quality and performance management techniques are considered, as is the impact of the financial crash in 2008 and of the 2010–15 Coalition government’s austerity policies which followed. All of these developments have had important implications for social work as a profession, and we discuss their impact on professional education, training and regulation.

Chapter 6 examines social work in practice in terms of the interface between the state and the individual. It traces the shift from responding to need, which characterized much early social work and welfare state provision, to an emphasis on risk, which currently determines eligibility for access to many social work services. We examine the rationale for and ascendance of evidence-based practice in social work, and the types of research methodologies and knowledge favoured by policy makers. Following this, concepts and practices associated with service user empowerment are discussed, exemplified by the personalization agenda in adult social care. We consider the consequences of the dual emphasis on risk and empowerment for the relationship between service users and social workers.

Chapter 7 positions UK social work within an international context and explains the impact of globalization – technologically, culturally, socially, politically and economically – on social work both internationally and in respect of individual countries. It examines how globalization has given rise to new problems in which social workers have a role to play – such as migration and the position of legal and illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees – as well as highlighting the contribution of migrants to different countries’ social work and social care workforces and the global chains of care which migration creates. We show how global capital investment in care services as profitable businesses creates new kinds of local problems in a marketized system of care. The chapter discusses the importance of supranational organizations such as the European Union (EU), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the UN, and their role in shaping the social policies of individual nations. It shows how the attempt to build a global profession has to address differences in knowledge and cultures both within and between nations, and differences in power and resources, particularly between the Global North and South.

The concluding chapter summarizes the key issues addressed in the book and makes some suggestions about how social workers individually, and as a profession, can use the analysis presented here to support them in defending social work and continuing to pursue its goals of responding to need and promoting social justice, equality and human rights.